Case Study of a New Generation Call Center

Case Study of a New Generation Call Center Chiung-I Chang* and tzy-yau lee** *Department of Information Management National Taichung Institute of Technology E-mail: ccy@ntit.edu.tw **Department of Leisure & Recreation Management National Taichung Institute of Technology E-mail: tylee@ntit.edu.tw ABSTRACT As the Call Center has become part of an enterprise's overall CRM (Customer Relationship Management) mechanism, how to construct an effective Call Center system to service customers and make profit are key issues in these years. In the past, Call Centers focused on providing the ability to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time for the mass customers to interact with the company when purchases or problems occur, and to reduce the burden of the company to carry as a cost of doing business. Today, it has played the role of an emerging new implement in marketing area. It is no longer just an incoming window as before, but can be integrated with CRM (Customer Relationship Management), E-commerce and IT systems of the company to from a Contact Center[1-3]. As a new generation Call Center, it has some distinct concepts and technologies. In this paper, we introduce two new mainstream technologies to enhance traditional Call Centers: Web-based and Network-based technologies Call Center. We also illustrate an enhance project of the Telco that shows how to integrate customer information from individual legacy systems through the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) architecture, and to reduce the reaction time consumed by CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) equipments and those legacy systems [4-6]. Finally, a CPEP project and new version of CAS (Call Center Application System) to improve the operation of agents and customer service will be mentioned as well. Keywords: Call Center, Contact Center, CRM, CTI. 1. INTRODUCTION A Call Center is a physical place where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organization, usually with some amount of computer automation. Typically, a Call Center has the ability to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, to screen calls and forward them to someone qualified to handle them, and to log calls. Call Centers are used by mail-order catalog organizations, telemarketing companies, computer product help desks, and any large organization that uses the telephone to sell or service products and services. As the Call Center has become part of an enterprise's overall CRM (Customer 1

Case Study of a New Generation Call Center Relationship Management) system, Call Centers have become common features of the commercial aspect in these years [7,8]. In the past, it focuses on providing a convenient service window for the mass customers to interact with the company when problems or questions occurred. Some of them even provides some purchase functions, and therefore reduces the cost of doing the business for companies such as telephone companies [1]. Today, Call Centers have played the role of an emerging new implement in marketing area. It can be integrated with E-commerce, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and IT systems of the company and has a totally different perspective. Types of Call Centers seats forecast on Taiwan are shown in Figure 1. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces components of a Traditional Call Center, including CTI, IVR, PBX, ACD, Servers, etc. We introduce the concepts, technologies and features of a new Generation Call Center in the section 3, such as proactive, integrated customer profiling, revenue contribution, diverse medium types, etc., and most of new functions of a new generation Call Center. In section 4, a case study of the Telephone Company is illustrated, including the CPEP (Call Center Process Enhance Project) and CAS (Call Center Application System) projects. Finally, we make a brief conclusion in section 5. 2. A Traditional Call Center Figure 1. Types of Call Centers seats forecast on Taiwan A Traditional Call Center is based on CTI technology to developing the system framework. CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) is the use of computers to manage telephone calls. The term is used in describing the computerized services of call centers, such as those that direct your phone call to the right department at a business you're calling. It was at first commercialized for mainframe computers to provide remote control of PBX systems in the 1970s. After many decades, the evolution was started in the 1990s, since the performance of personal computer (PC) increased rapidly, such that the technology of PC was integrated into CTI, and many CTI standards have been established. Asatani [5] and Chou [6] provided an excellent survey for CTI standards and its applications. The key factors of success for a Call Center are efficient delivery of services, while operating the 2

customer as inexpensively as possible. Customer interaction used to be a cost of doing business. If the company could reduce the costs while maintaining a certain process of response, it can improve the competitiveness. Figure 2 shows the architecture of the Traditional Call Centers. There are many components of the Call Center, including CTI, IVR, PBX, ACD, Communication server, E-mail server, DB server, WEB server, FAX server, and so on. Figure 2. Traditional Call Center architecture Call Centers are getting ready to become overall customer contact centers and remain the strategic customer interface for customer-facing company, despite the emergence of the Web as a business-critical self-service medium. There are two main reasons for this [7]: Call Centers are where companies talk to their customers, discovering their requirements, persuading them to perform business transactions and satisfying their requirements. They have an important advantage over self-service media - they allow businesses to be proactive in ways that would often be rejected or ignored when self-service media are used. Today, Call Centers should be viewed as profit centers, not cost centers. Even though a lot of companies spend huge sums of money on the Call Center, but the smart ones realize that their Call Centers generate even larger amounts of revenues (whether directly through sales or indirectly through service). Maximizing the effectiveness of the Call Center is, therefore, a high priority; this is the factor that makes the Call Center market extremely attractive to technology vendors. 3. New Generation Call Center The Telecom has constructed its new Generation Call Center and continued to enhance new functions in these years. It integrated the new concepts of the Call Center, such as proactive, integrated customer profiling, revenue contribution, diverse medium types, etc., and most of new technologies such as Web-based and Network-based functions of a new generation Call Center. As a tool of marketplace, it is not only deal with inbound calls but 3

Case Study of a New Generation Call Center also enhance the outbound applications, Customer Relationship Management utility, and many new business models. To achieve the proposed functions as mentioned above. The system need to incorporate with many legacy systems to integrate customer profiles or records to be the useful information, and then return to the client through a common information bus. This project adopts the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) as a common information bus to interconnect many back-end systems and extract those distributed customer profiles into the front-end client. An EAI middleware is defined as the use of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications. It is the process of linking such applications within a single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping changes to the existing applications or data structures. Besides enhancing standard middleware, we also verify the flowchart of a customer call from IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to the service done by the agent. We divided each step of the information flow and checked its sequence, such as intent to optimization the sequence flow and reduce the time consuming needed for a service. As a new Generation Call Center, it has some distinct concepts and technologies. We summarize current issues as follows: Proactive Improved customer profiling Revenue contribution Combine with organization s IT systems Diverse medium types Supporting Virtual Call Center operations Base of these characteristics, we will illustrate two structures of the new Generation Call Center: Web-based Call Center [9,10] and Network-based Call Center [11]. Web-based Call Center: As the Internet revolution progresses, the number of households getting on the Internet has increased exponentially [12]. Therefore using the Web to enhance the effectiveness of traditional Call Center interactions turns into an important issue and Web-based Call Centers become one of the most promising services. Web-based Call Center not only provide voice communications but also handles interactions between customers and Call Center agents that involve the Internet services and real-time communication, including video conference, screen synchronization, e-mail, information sharing, etc., between the two parties. The major functions provided by Web-based Call Center are showing as follows: Web-dial, Web Self-Service Solutions, Screen Synchronization, Push technology, Application Sharing, Call-me-Back, Call-me-Now, Click-to-fax, Auto response e-mail, Text Chat, Video Conference, Click stream Analysis. Network-based Call Center: Network-based Call Center performs one or more of the 4

major functions of a Call Center via equipment installed in the service provider's network. Telecom service providers now have an additional opportunity to provide many of these capabilities as value-added services from within their networks. These services may be entirely embedded in the service provider's network, or be incorporated with those functions delivered from within the network with functions performed by equipment located at the Call Center. Based on Network-based Call Center, it could realize such as Virtual Call Center. Network-based Call Center has the potential to offer Call Center operators benefits in some or all of the following features: Flexibility and scalability Improved customer service Future-proofing More effective operational management Cost savings. In network-based Call Center, a Call Center with multiple sites can operate as a single virtual Call Center. Incoming calls are queued in the network service provider s (NSP) network instead of at the Call Center sites. These characteristics will increase the flexibility and scalability of a Call Center, and also require less for capacity planning. The queuing and distribution of incoming calls in the public network allows Call Centers to improve their level of customer service since all agents can be available to take all incoming calls. As a result, customers spend less time in the queue. By adopting a service-based approach to Call Centers, Call Center operators can offload some of the risk of technology becoming obsolete onto the service provider that prevent risks in CPE-based Call Center. It becomes the service provider's responsibility to anticipate future requirements and to plan its infrastructure accordingly. Network-based services can make Call Center operation easier to monitor and manage. Performance metrics, such as customer queuing times and agent utilization, can be more readily accessible. This enables a Call Center manager to focus on higher-level, business-related aspects of the operation - such as staff performance and customer satisfaction. The last feature, cost saving, is obvious. Since CPE-based Call Centers are expensive to set up and capacity planning tends to be generous, over-provisioning of resources is quite common. A service-based Call Center is easier to scale up or down in response to changing call volumes: Call Center operators need only pay for the capacity they require at any given time. This system provides lots of intelligent features and applications to fully support the operation of a new Generation Call Center. These features are classified into five categories: Inbound management Outbound management Web-based applications Network-based applications 5

Case Study of a New Generation Call Center System environment and management We introduce some important features of them and summarize as follows. Some terminologies are not uniformly defined in the standards or specifications, but are the most frequently used in those cases. Inbound management: Automatic call distribution (ACD) distribution incoming calls to agents fairly or follows the system predefine rules. ACD networking supports ACD services by multiple Call Centers to support network-based Call Center Intelligent routing provides the smart call handling, that is, routing to the most appropriate agent or ACD based on the caller s record of acquisition and claim, for example, Skill based routing. Screen Pop enables to post caller s record from the database to the screen before the agent answering a call. The agent can then be prepared well for the customer when answering. Agent system IVR provides call handling by IVR for smart routing to the most appropriate agent. Outbound management: Multi-dialing mode supports provide preview dialing to dial via a call button on the screen, predictive dialing to automatic dialing to relevant customers extracted from the database, and progressive dialing. Automatic dialing automatically dials a phone number from a list extracted from the database, and forward the call to an agent when it is answered. Auto call-back agent may make an appointment with customer as needed. The system will automatic dialing when the time is up. These applications including campaign call-back, personal call-back and customer initialize via web or IVR. Calling list management provides functions including call list filtering, sorting, weighting, merging, import and export to management call list. Web-based applications: Call me now and call me back provides automatic callback to a visitor browsing the web page who want to communicate directly with the agent immediate (call me now) or wait system's leisure (call me back). The visitor initials the action by clicking the button on his/her computer screen. PC telephony (desktop software) based on H.323 protocol suit, customer can uses a PC as a telephone terminal to communicate via the Internet to the agent. Unified messaging provides a common user interface for e-mail, voice-mail, fax and telephone messages. Messages can be retrieved in any of these formats. 6

Network-based applications: Virtual Call Center supports multi-site Call Centers each can operate independent and backup each other, or they can work together as a unit via workload balancing function. Centralize management one site can management and monitoring multi-site Call Centers operation. Such as system configuration, call tracking, and so on. Remote Call Center supports the agent works in different location via remote cabinet while operate as the data center. Remote agent provides dial up capability to support the agent dial to connect with data center to login the system. The functions and operations as well as the data center. System environment and management: Dynamic configuration most of system s configuration can be setting and applying dynamically. No need to reboot the system to prevent services be interrupted. Screen transfer supports teleconferencing between two agents who share the screen image that is transferred from the first agent s computer screen to the second agent s. Hot desking and call blending provide flexible features to support operations, agent can login in any desktop identified by user ID. Any desktop can be scheduling as inbound or outbound services and agent needn t re-login the system while the state changes. Agent performance provides performance monitor and analysis features to show agent, group, and all stuff performance data. It also triggers an alarm when the threshold is reached. System management and reporting provide system management including single-site/ multi-site Call Center administration and monitoring. Statistic reports of hit ratio, connect ratio, agent performance, busy factor, ACD Queue, routing point, e-mail, and so on. The system had been constructed most of the features, some of the new functions such as web-based and network-based Call Center functions will be implement in this year. Figure 3 shows the conceptual architecture of the new generation Call Center. Figure 3. The telecom Call Center conceptual architecture 7

Case Study of a New Generation Call Center 4. Case Study of the Telephone Company CPEP (Call Center Process Enhance Project) is an enhanced project of the Telco s Call Center. The goal of this project is to improve many issues of existing Call Center information system, such as complex information process flow, dispersed legacy systems, scattered customer profile, little assistant information for agent, non-integrated billing records, etc., these problems result in inefficiency and worse service quality. This project modifies the IVR s information flow to reduce the data retrieve time and adopts the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) architecture to decrease complexity of connecting with legacy systems and ensuring that information in multiple systems is kept consistent while a customer dial to the Call Center and want to talk with the agent. In the past, while a user dialed to the call canter, he/she should follow guiding of the IVR and chose the item that he/she needs. After he/she finished the operations, the IVR will pass to the related system according the information it caught. The information flow chart is shown in Figure 4. It depends on the selected service item and those cooperation systems. Since most of inbound calls are about billing record, promotion message, product information, value-added service, or trouble appeal, etc. So that the Call Center system needs to both connecting with considerable individual legacy systems and also invoking many client windows. In the new system, we adopt the EAI architecture, it is defined as the use of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications. Since EAI is the process of linking such applications within a single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping changes to the existing applications or data structures. In other words, EAI is the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources in the enterprise. Figure 4. Information flow chart of the new generation Call Center Another important application system in this project is the enhanced of CAS (Call Center Application System). The purpose of this system is to integrate those messages push by the EAI bus retrieve from related legacy systems and then send to the front-end user 8

interface for agent. The new version of CAS provide many new functions, such as prompt warning window to indicate critical massage, on-line request for boss s supporting, calling transfer to other domain group, etc. As for the customer information, besides the customer core information, it also increase some new labels that extending related services, such as phone equipment information, customer billing information, household billing information, personal credit check, etc. Figure 5 (a) and (b) are shown the agent screen comparison of the old and new system. 5. Conclusions Figure 5. (a) The old version of the agent screen (b) The new version of the agent screen As the Call Center has playing more important role than itself before, most of the enterprises have to upgrade the orientation and function of the Call Center as well. In this paper, we have presented the new generation Call Center of the Telco, it has many quite different concepts, technologies and features as before. We introduced two new generation s architectures-web-based and network-based Call Center. Finally, we also introduce the upgrade project of the Telecom Call Center as a case study, including using EAI architecture to realize the Call Center Process Enhance Project and the Call Center Application System. References: [1] M. J. Tarokh, Hoda Ghahremanloo, Intelligence CRM: A Contact Center Model, IEEE International Conference on Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics, pp. 1-6, 27-29 Aug. 2007. [2] Linhai Qi, Suxia Ma, Keqin Liu, Research on Predictive Dialing System Based on Distributed Call Center, Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications, pp. 194-201, 9-11 Aug. 2006. [3] K.R. Nix, Integrating the call center into the telecom enterprise, Network Operations and Management Symposium, IEEE, vol. 1, pp. 31-43, 1998. [4] Federica C, Ilaria T. Adapting the interaction in a call center system, Interacting with computers, pp.478-506, vol. 18, 2006. 9

Case Study of a New Generation Call Center [5] K. Asatani, Standardization on Multimedia Communications: Computer-Telephony- Integration-Related Issues, IEEE Communications Magazine, pp. 105-109, July 1998. [6] S.L. Chou, Y.B. Lin, COMPUTER TELEPHONY INTEGRATION AND ITS APPLICATIONS, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 3 no. 1, pp. 2-11, First Quarter 2000. [7] S. T. L, L. Y. Shue, S. F. Lee, Enabling customer relationship management in ISP services through mining usage patterns, Expert Systems with Applications, pp.621-632, vol. 30, 2006. [8] http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/home/0,289692,sid11,00.html [9] Ovum Reports, Next Generation Call Centers-CTI, Voice and the Web, June. 1999. [10] M. B. Sung, H. H. Sung, C. P. Sang, A web-based system for analyzing the voices of call center customer in the service industry, Expert systems with applications. pp. 29-41, vol. 28, 2005. [11] Ovum Reports, Next-based Call Centers Services: Market Strategies, June. 1999. [12] Uyless Black, VOICE OVER IP, PRENTICE HALL PTR, 2000. 10

摘要近年來由於 Call Center 已成為企業整體客戶關係管理 (CRM) 機制之一部分, 如何建置一有效之客服中心來服務客戶並為公司帶來利潤已成為一重要議題過去 Call Center 主要角色為接受短時間大量的客戶來電, 詢問或申請公司相關的服務產品, 或者是問題障礙之處理, 並以降低公司之處理成本為主要考量時至今日,Call Center 已不只單純扮演前述角色, 它已成為公司重要的市場行銷利器, 結合了客戶關係管理電子商務以及公司內部 IT 系統, 它已成為新型態多功能之 Contact Center 本文介紹了新一代之 Call Center 的觀念與技術, 包含了 Web-based 與 Network-based 之功能與架構介紹並以電信公司升級至新一代之 Call Center 為例, 其中包含採用 EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) 架構, 以簡化客服系統與企業為數眾多之後端系統介接產生之複雜度, 簡化流程提升效率最後並說明如何藉由 CPEP 及 CAS 計畫之推動, 以改善值機人員之操作並提升客戶服務品質關鍵字 :Call Center, Contact Center, CRM, CTI. 11